Histories Of Emotion

A sweeping exploration of the ways in which emotions shaped the course of human history, and how our experience and understanding of emotions have evolved along with us. "Eye-opening and thought-provoking!” (Gina Rippon, author of The Gendered Brain) We humans like to think of ourselves as rational creatures, who, as a species, have relied on calculation and intellect to survive. But many of the most important moments in our history had little to do with cold, hard facts and a lot to do with feelings. Events ranging from the origins of philosophy to the birth of the world’s major religions, the fall of Rome, the Scientific Revolution, and some of the bloodiest wars that humanity has ever experienced can’t be properly understood without understanding emotions. Drawing on psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, art, and religious history, Richard Firth-Godbehere takes readers on a fascinating and wide ranging tour of the central and often under-appreciated role emotions have played in human societies around the world and throughout history—from Ancient Greece to Gambia, Japan, the Ottoman Empire, the United States, and beyond. A Human History of Emotion vividly illustrates how our understanding and experience of emotions has changed over time, and how our beliefs about feelings—and our feelings themselves—profoundly shaped us and the world we inhabit.

Princess Diana’s death was a tragedy that provoked mourning across the globe; the death of a homeless person, more often than not, is met with apathy. How can we account for this uneven distribution of emotion? Can it simply be explained by the prevailing scientific understanding? Uncovering a rich tradition beginning with Aristotle, The Secret History of Emotion offers a counterpoint to the way we generally understand emotions today. Through a radical rereading of Aristotle, Seneca, Thomas Hobbes, Sarah Fielding, and Judith Butler, among others, Daniel M. Gross reveals a persistent intellectual current that considers emotions as psychosocial phenomena. In Gross’s historical analysis of emotion, Aristotle and Hobbes’s rhetoric show that our passions do not stem from some inherent, universal nature of men and women, but rather are conditioned by power relations and social hierarchies. He follows up with consideration of how political passions are distributed to some people but not to others using the Roman Stoics as a guide. Hume and contemporary theorists like Judith Butler, meanwhile, explain to us how psyches are shaped by power. To supplement his argument, Gross also provides a history and critique of the dominant modern view of emotions, expressed in Darwinism and neurobiology, in which they are considered organic, personal feelings independent of social circumstances. The result is a convincing work that rescues the study of the passions from science and returns it to the humanities and the art of rhetoric.

This study addresses two desiderata of historical emotion research: reflecting on the interdependence of textual functions and the representation of emotions, and acknowledging the interdependence of studies on the premodern and modern periods in the history of emotion. Contemporary research on the history of emotion is characterised by a proliferation of studies on very different eras, authors, themes, texts, and aspects. The enthusiasm and confidence with which situations, actions, and interactions involving emotions in history are discovered, however, has led to overly direct attempts to access the represented objects (emotions/feelings/affects); as a result, too little attention has been paid to the conditions and functions of their representations. That is why this study engages with the emotion research of historians from an unashamedly philological perspective. Such an approach provides, among other things, insights into the varied, often contradictory, observations that can be made about the history of emotion in modernity and premodernity.

Celebrate feelings in all their shapes and sizes in this New York Times bestselling picture book from the Growing Hearts series! Happiness, sadness, bravery, anger, shyness . . . our hearts can feel so many feelings! Some make us feel as light as a balloon, others as heavy as an elephant. In My Heart explores a full range of emotions, describing how they feel physically, inside, with language that is lyrical but also direct to empower readers to practice articulating and identifying their own emotions. With whimsical illustrations and an irresistible die-cut heart that extends through each spread, this gorgeously packaged and unique feelings book is sure to become a storytime favorite.

The first accessible text book on the theories, methods, achievements and problems in this burgeoning field of historical inquiry.

"This book is the first history of musical emotion in any language. Combining intellectual history, music studies, philosophy and cognitive psychology, it unfolds a history of musical emotion across a thousand years of Western art music, from chant to pop. It affords a new way of analysing music, revealing the relationship between emotion and musical structure. The book also provides an introduction to the latest approaches to emotion research, as well as an original theory of how musical emotion works. The book is disposed in two parts. Part 1 (chapters 1-4) comprises the theoretical foundation of the book. Part 2 (chapters 5-9) provides an historical narrative from medieval to contemporary music. Chapter 1 summarizes contemporary theories of emotion in general, and of musical emotion in particular, bringing together seminal philosophers and psychologists. Chapter 2 contains the core of the book's original thesis: that five basic emotions (happiness, sadness, anger, tenderness, and fear) constitute five categories of musical emotion throughout the common-practice period. Chapter 3 outlines a variety of complex musical emotions, such as wonder, nostalgia, envy, and disgust. Chapter 4 explores the historiography of emotion, including the seminal writings of Elias, Rosenwein, and Reddy. Part 2 of the book (chapters 5-9) explores a millennium of Western music in terms of shifting categories of emotion: from affections and passions through sentiments, emotions proper, to modern affect"--

Offering insights on the wide range of sources that are available from across the globe and throughout history for the study of the history of emotions, this book provides students with a handbook for beginning their own research within the field. Divided into three parts, Sources for the History of Emotions begins by giving key starting points into the ethical, methodological and theoretical issues in the field. Part II shows how emotions historians have proved imaginative in their discovering and use of varied materials, considering such sources as rituals, relics and religious rhetoric, prescriptive literature, medicine, science and psychology, and fiction, while Part III offers introductions to some of the big or emerging topics in the field, including embodied emotions, comparative emotions, and intersectionality and emotion. Written by key scholars of emotions history, the book shows readers the ways in which different sources can be used to extract information about the history of emotions, highlighting the kind of data available and how it can be used in a field for which there is no convenient archive of sources. The focused discussion of sources offered in this book, which not only builds on existing research, but encourages further efforts, makes it ideal reading and a key resource for all students of emotions history.

Emotion in the Tudor Court is a transdisciplinary work that uses Renaissance and modern scientific models of emotion to analyze the literary cultures of Tudor-era English court society, providing a robust new analysis of the emotional dynamics of sixteenth-century England.